Samuel Phelps was the seventh child and second son of Robert Phelps and his wife Ann, daughter of Captain Mark Turner. Phelps was born on 13 February 1804, in what is now called Devonport, but was then known as Plymouth Dock. He was educated at a local school and then at a classical school at Saltash, Cornwall.^[1] Unlike his younger brother Robert – a fine mathematician who became master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge – Phelps was not academically inclined and he developed a strong desire to go on the stage.^[2] The family was well connected and prosperous,^[3] and Phelps's father provided him with opportunities to visit London, where a cousin who was a dramatic critic frequently took him to the theatre. During the season of 1814–15 the family spent several months in London, and Phelps saw celebrated actors including John Philip Kemble, Charles Kemble, Charles Young and Edmund Kean.^[4]

Orphaned at the age of sixteen, Phelps became a junior proofreader on a local newspaper, and acted in amateur productions in the evenings.^[4] A year later he moved to London, hoping to find work in a theatre.^[5] Failing to do so, he worked as a proofreader for The Globe,^[5] and then The Sun.^[1] With Douglas Jerrold and W. E. Love, two colleagues from the papers, he formed an amateur theatrical group, performing at a small theatre in Islington, giving up to three performances a week.^[6]

Phelps turned professional in 1826, in which year he married the sixteen-year-old Sarah Cooper. It was a happy, lifelong marriage; they had three sons and three daughters. From 1826 to 1837 Phelps built up a career in the provinces, beginning with small, meagrely-paid parts and gradually moving up to leading roles.^{[1][n 1]} His biographer J. P. Wearing comments, "his early career was a catalogue of numerous towns and of roles growing gradually in importance". Among the towns where Phelps played, Wearing lists Hull, Sheffield, Leeds, Preston, Perth, Dundee, Aberdeen, Inverness and Belfast, and his roles as Malcolm (Macbeth), Benvolio (Romeo and Juliet), the Ghost (Hamlet), Macduff (Macbeth), Claudius (Hamlet), and the title role in Julius Caesar.^[1] From these, he moved up to the leading roles in King Lear, Macbeth, Othello and The Merchant of Venice, playing in theatres in southern England. In 1836 a London critic wrote:

In 1837 Phelps received offers of West End engagements from two rival actor-managers: Benjamin Webster at the Theatre Royal Haymarket and William Macready at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. The Western Times reported:

This turned out to be an overestimate of Macready's magnanimity. After Phelps made a successful London début, starring as Shylock in Webster's production of The Merchant of Venice, and then playing Hamlet, Othello and Richard III at the Haymarket, he moved to Covent Garden, where he remained from 1837 to 1839.^[11] Macready, finding himself equalled and even outshone by Phelps, soon restricted him to secondary supporting roles such as Antonio in The Tempest, and the Constable of France in Henry V.^{[1][n 3]} After his contract with Macready expired, Phelps played at the Haymarket and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane between 1840 and 1843.^[11]

In 1843 a change in English law relaxed the restrictions on London theatres that had been in force since the Restoration. Before the Theatres Act 1843, only the officially licensed Patent Theatre companies were allowed to stage serious, spoken drama. Other theatre companies were restricted to opera, comedy, pantomime and melodrama.^[13]

Phelps became the first to take advantage of the change in the law.^[11] Thomas Greenwood, the lessee of Sadler's Wells Theatre in Islington, approached him with a proposal to run the theatre, staging serious drama. Together with a leading actress, Mary Warner, Phelps took on the management of the house. According to a historian writing forty years later, Sadler's Wells was then "dilapidated and almost forgotten".^[14] It had the advantages of a large capacity (2,500) and a low rent, and the disadvantages of a location far away from the West End, and a local Islington audience, largely working class and poorly educated.^[1] Phelps's biographer Joseph Knight writes, "while the poetical drama was at its lowest ebb in the theatres of the west end [Phelps] succeeded in ... 'making Shakespeare pay' for nearly twenty years". Knight adds that Phelps was an intelligent and spirited manager, and that Sadler's Wells became "a recognised home of the higher drama, and, to some extent, a training school for actors".^[2] Among the players in Phelps's company were Laura Addison, George Bennett, Fanny Cooper and Isabella Glyn.^[15]

The new management opened on 27 May 1844, with a production of Macbeth, with Phelps in the title role and Warner as Lady Macbeth. In the programme for the opening night, Phelps wrote:

During his eighteen years in charge of Sadler's Wells – fifteen in sole charge, after Warner left at the end of the third season – Phelps produced more than 1,600 performances of thirty-one of Shakespeare's plays, as well as many plays dating from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century.^{[1][n 4]} By the standards of the time, Phelps was rigorous in his approach to Shakespeare's texts. He cut all the textual accretions, by Colly Cibber and others, to which the theatregoing public had been accustomed for more than a century. Although, as was then customary – and has to some extent remained so^{[n 5]} – he cut many of Shakespeare's lines, he cut those of his own characters as readily as he cut those of others', and unlike other actor-managers (then and later) he did not build up the star parts at the expense of the supporting ones.^[19][20] Care was taken to ensure that scenery and costuming were historically accurate and enhanced the play rather than being merely spectacular.^[1]

After he played Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Athenaeum said of him, "We have been sometimes tempted to think that if Mr Phelps had early taken to comedy, and particularly to what are technically termed character parts, he would have accomplished a more profitable reputation than that he now enjoys as a tragedian."^[21] And of his performance in Twelfth Night the same journal said, "The Malvolio of Mr Phelps is a part by which he will be remembered. The making up is so complete that the actor's person cannot be identified until he speaks. The execution of the part is equally complete; elaborately finished – thoroughly carried out to the minutest particular."^[21]

In the spring of 1859 Phelps and his Sadler's Wells company played a series of engagements in Berlin, Leipzig, and Hamburg. This was the first English touring company to appear in Germany since the seventeenth century.^[22] British critics had long observed that one of the characteristics of Phelps's acting style – contrasting with those of Kean and Macready – was his ability to express intensity and depth of emotion without resorting to unnatural vehemence and overt theatricality. The German critics were similarly impressed – one praised his "psychological truthfulness" as Macbeth – but they were at least as impressed by Phelps as a director and the unobtrusive naturalness of his productions.^[23]

Greenwood retired as the company's business manager in 1861; Phelps found the strain of running the theatre single-handed, at a time when his wife was gravely ill, too much, and in March 1862 he resigned.^[1]

Phelps accepted an offer from Charles Fechter to join the latter's company at the Lyceum Theatre, but the collaboration was an unhappy one, and in 1863 he joined F. B. Chatterton and Edmund Falconer at Drury Lane, where he remained for seven years, successfully reprising many of his old parts and adding the title role in Byron's Manfred (1863), Mephistopheles in Faust (1866), and the Doge in Bayle Bernard's The Doge of Venice (1867).^[1]

Phelps's wife and eldest son both died in 1867, and his actor son, Edmund, died in 1870 at the age of thirty-two. Phelps continued to act, touring in the provinces and playing in the West End. A succession of colds weakened him and he died at a sanatorium near Epping on 6 November 1878, aged 74. He was buried, alongside his wife, at Highgate Cemetery on 13 November 1878.^[1]

• Allen, Shirley (1971). Samuel Phelps and Sadler's Wells Theatre. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. OCLC 1036847847.
• Blakemore, Michael (2013). Stage Blood. London: Faber and Faber. OCLC 1280720825.
• Coleman, John (1886). Memoirs of Samuel Phelps. London: Remington. OCLC 5636523.
• Engle, Ronald G; Daniel J. Watermeier (October 1972). "Phelps and His German Critics". 'Educational Theatre Journal. 24 (3): 237–247. doi:10.2307/3205893. JSTOR 3205893. (subscription required)
• Levin, Bernard (1985) [1983]. Enthusiasms. London: Coronet. ISBN 0-340-36927-2.
• May Phelps, William; John Forbes-Robertson (1886). The Life and Life-work of Samuel Phelps. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington. OCLC 2280361.
• Pascoe, Charles Eyre (1879). The Dramatic List. London: Hardwicke and Bogue. OCLC 4283917.
• Sappa, Cristiana; Enrico Bonadio (2022). The Subjects of Literary and Artistic Copyright. Northampton, Massachusetts: Elgar. ISBN 978-1-80-088176-1.